OSSEC is a host-based intrusion detection system (HIDS). It is specially well known for monitoring files that shouldn’t change on a system (such as critical system files, or binaries, etc) and warning administrators (or anyone you’d like) about those issues. But it does more such as rootkit detection and log analysis with a dedicated engine. […]
How to install OSSEC server on Ubuntu
How to mitigate DoS attacks with mod_evasive on FreeBSD
Denial of Service attacks or the distributed version of them (DDoS) have been growing throughout the years with their ups and downs. In my view the only thing that will happen to them is even bigger growth. With the advent of IoT devices the next decade will see an increase in these kind of attacks. […]
The CentOS party is over, isn’t it?
Disclaimer: What you are about to read may contain inaccuracies. Feel free to discuss them somewhere else. This is also my opinion and as such it may change through time, maybe tomorrow, next month, next year, next decade or never. I do also make very few reviews (if any) of what I write here, so […]
How to install the FAMP stack
You may have heard of the LAMP stack which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP or Perl. This is the same but instead of using the GNU/Linux operating system we’ll use FreeBSD. This is the FAMP stack. There are two ways to install software in FreeBSD, packages and the ports collections. Which in the […]
A brief introduction to SSL/TLS certificates
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and it an old implementation of a crytographic protocol. TLS, or Transport Layer Security, is a new one. They are both used to have privacy in the communications between different parties. They are used to secure email, web browsing, instant messaging, etc These protocols work in a complex way […]
How to setup MariaDB master-slave replication on FreeBSD
Having all the data in just one server is not the best idea. Especially when talking about a database server. Spreading information in several boxes is a good measure to prevent data loss but also for performance. A MySQL/MariaDB master-slave replication scheme is often used as a good solution for both, data redundancy and speed. […]
How to improve Apache HTTP performance on FreeBSD
There are some nice articles on the internet telling you how to improve your Apache HTTP server’s performance. I did my bit on FreeBSD land. While turning on a different MPM than the prefork default one increases Apache HTTP performance by a lot, it is not the only thing one may do. For example if […]
How to configure Modsecurity 3 for WordPress on FreeBSD
A few weeks ago I wrote a guide on how to install Modsecurity 3 on Apache HTTP for the FreeBSD operating system. However there’s a catch with that setting and with Modsecurity in general. As good as it is as a WAF you need to at least adjust its configuration to the tool one pretends […]
How to manually update Letsencrypt certificates on FreeBSD
Update 05-2020: If anyone is interested on the automatic process you can read my tutorial on DigitalOcean about the topic. On this guide we will manually update our Letsencrypt certificate on FreeBSD for a single website. It is a simple operation that can be automated as a cron job, but seeing it is always informative […]
Linux VS open source UNIX
Linux is the mainstream UNIX-like platform of choice in the modern world. There are valid open source code base alternatives from which many businesses have benefited from. This is a different approach on both.